Health creators

Medicine has always been a fruitful area for inventors and innovators, as well as a business battleground. And while recent decades have seen much of that action concentrated on the areas of drug discovery and pharmaceuticals, it’s increasingly becoming a fruitful area for engineering. Latest figures from the European Patent Office (EPO) show medical devices as the fastest-growing sector for patent applications, while pharmaceutical applications have declined at roughly the same rate.

Jeremy Philpott, who leads the innovation unit at the EPO’s Munich office, thinks the matching rates of growth and decline in these sectors is a coincidence. But the trend is clear, he says, and may be linked to the costs associated with the different kinds of research. ‘It’s phenomenally expensive to take a drug to the market,’ he told The Engineer at the EPO’s recent European Inventor Award event in Berlin. ‘For every compound that makes it to clinical trial, there are many that fall by the wayside and, of course, it costs to develop those as well. And the cost of complying with international regulations around the world is enormous.’